For more than a century, the huddle has been one of the most defining fixtures of American football, a sacrosanct 11-man oval where the likes of Johnny Unitas reshaped plays on the fly, Joe Montana cracked jokes to soothe anxious teammates and Roger Staubach diagnosed the hurt, the tired and the “spitting mad.”
But in today’s N.F.L., the huddle is slowly disappearing.
In the pursuit of more scoring, teams now employ some form of a hurry-up operating system aptly called the no-huddle offense. It is as it sounds, players darting from one play to the next.
Huddles remain the pervasive norm, but increasingly, many are condensed to several harried seconds, as quarterbacks bolt to the line of scrimmage and rely on hand signals and code words to communicate a new play to teammates as they line up.